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Bickering Blocks US Mobile Phone Payments
theodp writes "Imagine a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader. You wouldn't have to if you lived in Japan, where people have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. While nearly everyone who's tried it has liked this form of payment, consumers in the United States won't be able to wave-and-pay anytime soon: The companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses can't agree on how to split the resulting revenue."
But I can't see how waving my cellphone over a reader is an improvement over waving my credit card. The credit card is thinner, lighter and more waterproof than a cellphone.
When I go out, I always carry a wallet. It has my driver's license, credit card and cash in it. My cell phone may or may not be with me, depending on what I'm doing. Maybe it's in the car, or my backpack. If I were going to wave anything over a reader, it would most likely be my wallet.
Perhaps it's because I'm over 50, but when I hear people talking about combining media player, cell phone, digital camera, [whatever] into one single unit, all I see is one item that does everything "not quite as well" as the original separate items. The cellphone/camera is only 3 megapixel...OK for some uses; but not as good as my Canon point-and-shoot. My phone can hold a few gigabytes of music, nothing like the 80 G in my iPod. If the performance of the composite were equal or better, you might have me as a customer, but for now, I'll pick and choose.
Hell, I'd be happy to just get cell phone COVERAGE in a lot of the US.
Sheldon
They can also be hacked, which is also pretty neat if you're the hacker, but not if you're trying to build an infrastructure based on the cards.
Come to think of it, Chaum's electronic money (digital cash), especially the off-line anonymous variants, would be very well suited to the kind of mobile payments discussed in the article; and such a solution would preserve all the important properties of "ordinary" cash.
...We have a similar system. You pay to wave...
I can't wait to be able to steal money just by walking through a crowded room and "charging" each person's phone $5.
I've used cold hard cash, and that's neatest.
It's light, portable, needs no batteries and isn't subject to arbitrary restrictions or revocations. No devices or readers are needed. You don't need a "credit rating" to use it. And I can pay for pretty much anything, except those services which require me to spend extra cash on an alternative transaction medium.
Cash. Is. King.
May the Maths Be with you!
We have enough of a problem today with people living way beyond their means, and impulse spending with the credit and debit cards we have today.
Aside from the obvious problems we have in the US with a sense of entitlement to the luxuries in life, I think easy means of payments like this work like chips in a casino do. They abstract the fact that you are spending REAL money. You forget that you bought those chips with cold hard cash. With things like credit / debit cards...you tend to forget that you have to pay for them later (wich cc's), or that your bank account just lost some cash to this transaction.
Waving a phone in front of a machine, to me, would have the same effect.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You're not eager to introduce a payment option that has less overhead costs than physical money?
Let's consider the ticket system used by JR and Tokyo metro. Millions of people passing through those gates per hour across Tokyo, and there's someone out fixing the ticket-eating mechanical parts quite regularly.
Add in the costs of having guys go around collecting coins from and filling in ticket paper into the ticket producing terminals.
Handling money costs a lot of money, and they are pushing the SUICA cards real hard with advertisement everywhere. So every passenger who's not using one of those RFID cards means less profit.
You're advocating lowering consumption by making it harder to pay...
- These characters were randomly selected.
And yet I've yet to see one in use in Japan. Granted I only stay a month there every year, but cash is king in Japan and Asia in general. I rarely see credit cards being used (although it has become a bit more common over the past 15 years).
Now, when the salesman gets finished telling me about their latest phone which can do everything short of transforming into a giant robot (feature available in the next model) and asking what I'd like to do with it, I'll look like even more of a Cellphone Luddite by saying "make calls." I don't text, rarely take cell phone photos, and don't check the Internet from my phone. I upload my own ringtones ( http://www.myxer.com/make/ ) and don't care about applications or games on my phone. All I do is make phone calls.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
As long as the money grubbing corporation are involved, there will always be more overhead.
See: $2.00 fees on ATM transactions if you use the wrong bank machine.
In spirit, it's a great idea, however will not ever be useful if someone 'has to get paid' to use the service. There may be overhead with cash, but if you're counting (and many are these days) there is no value-add if it costs more.
Never underestimate the lengths to which some jerk will go to make some poor government employee's job miserable. Especially if they (a) have nothing to do with why the jerk is upset, (b) are powerless to change it, and (c) would be likely to commiserate with the jerk's predicament if he weren't being such a dick about it.
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Interesting. Truthfully, though, we are well on our way here in America to letting people avoid the consequences of bad decisions:
- Much talk about 'forgiving' the excess amount on mortgages, that is writing them down to the home's current value. Among the problems with this; The U.S. taxpayer gets to pay the difference, but doesn't get anything much. The homeowner gets out of a bad deal. The bank gets made whole. Whose error caused this? Unscrupulous lenders? Overly optimistic borrowers? Greedy banks? Investors thinking they got in on a 'sure thing' without understanding the risks and/or falsehoods involved? All of them. Quick question - why am *I*, as a taxpayer, paying for this? Oh, and paying my mortgage as well, thank you.
- People get overextended on credit pretty regularly. This is not new, so why not extend this caution to current payment methods? Oh, that would mean the U.S. economy would have to retract by the amount of 'credit/fake' income we spend on our cards etc. Some estimates are that we have been overspending in the U.S. by up to 6% a year for a decade. The bill is due.
- The objection that cell phone payments will encourage people to 'spend more' is probably true. So let's ban some advertising, pop-up/pop-under ads, etc. Sheesh.
Really.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.